Human Rights for Women

By Geraldine Ferraro;

Published: June 10, 1993

What to do about Bosnia? Development? At its world conference on human rights in Vienna, which begins today, the United Nations will wrestle with these issues. Women's human rights are at the center of both of them.

Women's human rights? Yes. In New York, U.N. diplomats from a world outraged about the Balkan carnage, including the systematic rape of countless women, have argued about what to do. And elsewhere in the U.N., diplomats are looking a year ahead toward a world conference on population and development, where women hold the key.

Several years ago, women's rights advocates worldwide began to turn up at the same conventions, seminars, university settings, diplomatic receptions and refugee centers. They had many different problems. But as they listened to one other, they saw they had at least one concern in common that no international organization was talking about: violence against women. Female infanticide. Genital mutilation. Wife murder. Sex tourism. Rape. Assault. Discrimination in health care. Barriers to political, social and economic equality that make millions of women less than third-class citizens.

As they talked, the women made a global connection: these weren't scattered "women's problems," not "minor" abuses that some governments had passed to a study commission and forgotten. The women recognized gender-based violence as a matter of fundamental human rights.

Although the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights nominally includes women, the icon of human rights abuse has been a man behind bars, tortured for speaking his mind. Abuse unique to women has been dismissed -- as traditional practice, as too common to worry about, as less important than other things. These are family problems, men say, and the family lies beyond international jurisdiction.

Some nations argued recently in Geneva that human rights are not universal -- that the concept of such rights shouldn't apply to poor countries struggling to develop. At a preparatory meeting for the conference, which is aimed at strengthening human rights, they accused the industrialized North of using charges of human rights abuses as an excuse to avoid giving aid. Development, they said, is a human right, too, much more important than trivialities like the right to vote. Not to mention the rights of mere women.

When women are beaten, raped and killed, as if it didn't matter, they are denied full humanity -- and beings who are less than fully human cannot be allowed to take part fully in government, business, development.

When little girls get less food, less medical care, less education and more work than little boys; when women can't travel, marry or leave home without some man's permission; when rights to vote, meet and speak out are circumscribed; when children and property belong legally only to men; when women are denied the right to control their bodies, how can women be fully human?

The systematic rapes in the former Yugoslavia have aroused the world. The quieter rapes, the quieter abuses, that go on daily have aroused at least half the world, the female half. How can any nation call itself civilized, how can any nation develop properly, until it recognizes the talent of half its population? The Tailhook scandal, the Anita Hill story, show that America is not beyond this blindness.

Slavery was a national and "family" custom and torture has been a traditional practice. The world now condemns them. Women's rights are also human rights. In Vienna, the Global Campaign for Women's Human Rights will press the conference to recognize this for the first time and to denounce abuse of women as abuse of human rights.

The campaign, involving more than 800 women's human rights groups, wants the conference to recommend that women's concerns be integrated into every level of U.N. operations. A liaison should be appointed to make sure women's human rights are considered in every U. N. project, and women's status should be studied in every nation's human rights report.

If this happens, governments will have to act on rights abuses that do not occupy the spotlight daily. And women will be freer to make their full contribution to economic growth.

Geraldine Ferraro is a member of the U.S. delegation to the U.N. world conference on human rights.